EXTREME BASEMENT DECLUTTER & ORGANIZE-Part 1. So much darn clutter & mess in the basement 🤦‍♀️

I don't want to do it, you guys. I don't want to do it. You don't. I don't want to do it. Tell me why Why did I think? I knew I had one old TV over here. Why do I have two? We're gonna try. We're gonna try our best today. OMG, welcome back to my channel. Filming in the dang basement today. It's Jodi Dunn. I am coming at you with a weekly declutter. I really was not gonna tackle this area, but I felt like I kind of had to out of some necessities that I will go through with you. My dang phone holder for my ring light broke, so I'm holding the darn camera. Sorry if it's shaky. I'll keep this intro quick. If you are new and you just found the channel, I am so happy that you are here. Would you please say hello to me and let me know that you are new right down there? I would love to welcome you to the channel and say hello back to you. And if you are already subscribed, I appreciate you so much. Thank you for coming back to another video. I do not have any expectations of finishing this project. For sure. This is gonna take me, I only showed you part of the basement. Let's just keep it real. I'm gonna walk you through what I'm gonna try to do, the necessity that I had to try to get some of this cleaned up. And you know, I always say I declutter in chunks. I do not take on projects in one day and try to do hours and hours. I just, that would overwhelm me. So I'm gonna, today is Thursday when I'm filming this. I'm gonna, I have one hour right now. I have one hour. I'm gonna see what I can accomplish and then I'll come back tomorrow and see what I can accomplish and so on. So, alright, I'm gonna turn the camera around. You're gonna see me cleaning and throwing away and donating and probably all those other things. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Alright, let's get to the mess. Okay, so obviously you can clearly see that this room needs some major decluttering and organization in here. The reason, the main reason that I decided to start tackling this room right now is because if you come from my couponing channel, you already know I'm a couponer. If you're brand new, then you may not know this, but I am a couponer. I have a very large, wonderful stockpile. I love couponing so much, but I am in Michigan and for the last two years, I've been keeping my stockpile out in my, or my laundry stockpile out in my garage because I have these beautiful shelves in my garage. Well, that's problematic in Michigan because we get very cold winters. So last year, I took all my laundry so that it wouldn't freeze inside my house and then I ended up having to do the same thing this year and I am actually gonna spray all of my shelves down with Lysol disinfectant spray because we have had a mouse problem in the past. I live in a very wooded area. It's a subdivision, but it's really wooded. So like we get deer in our backyard and we had probably been in this house for, I don't know, maybe four years before we knew that we had a mouse problem. I'm pretty sure that's a common problem for a lot of people that have houses or basements, but because the area is so wooded and we found out we had a mouse problem because one ended up on our main floor. OMG, it was quite a circus. And after that happened, we did some investigating and found some mouse droppings in the basement. So gross. But anyways, to be safe, I'm just going to go ahead and disinfect everything down here. And this back room is where we have our water softener as well. So it is like so dusty in this back room. So I'm just trying to clean up some of this dust as well. So I'm pulling everything off and dusting and disinfecting. And I'm going to try to go through some of these boxes that I have up there. Just when I thought I had already cleared out all the paper, I find a dang box full of paper. Thank goodness I now have a system for that so I'm not accumulating any new paper. But you know what? I got a goal for this basement right now. This box is just going to have to wait until later. Here are some of the salts that we put in this water softener that my husband does. And he just leaves the bags in here. It drives me nuts. So I'm going to clean these up. So anyways, I pulled all of my laundry in the house so that it wouldn't freeze and the few laundry bottles you saw on the shelves. That is just a small, a small little piece of the stockpile I have because I am an extreme couponer. So anyways, I put them in my dining room and it's a mess and it looks terrible and I spent all that time decluttering it and I have this these beautiful shelves down here. I mean, they're just wood shelves. I don't even think they've been finished, but I have all this storage space down here. So I'm going to get this decluttered. Right now. My number one priority is to get the laundry out of my dining room so that I can put it on these shelves and keep my dining room clutter free. And two reasons why I haven't already done that. Number one, because the basement is a mess. I didn't want to try to tackle it, but we're not putting it off any longer. And number two is because it's so convenient to have my laundry right in my garage. It's very accessible. It's easy access. And it's just kind of a pain to have to walk. I mean, it really isn't. To have to walk downstairs and get it. But it's fine. This just makes more sense because it's silly for me to put it in my garage and then every winter I have to move it in the house. So I'm just gonna do it now and be done with it. And I definitely have to get rid of these cardboard boxes, anything that I have in cardboard boxes and switch them to like plastic storage bins because things are just getting ruined from being in the cardboard boxes. Can you see how dusty this is? Just from the dang water softener and not to mention we do have a sump pump in our basement on the other side of the finished part and if it stops working or anything, which has happened to us before, it floods in this room. And thank goodness, we usually catch it before it gets too bad. But some of these boxes I could see had water damage on the bottom because they were sitting on the basement floor when it got wet. So I got to get rid of these cardboard boxes. And I told you my phone holder for my ring light broke. Guess what? My tripod phone holder just broke. So I'm sorry. I'm sure this is like terrible camera work here. I'm trying to hold the phone and show you what I'm doing. Oh my goodness. And more Lysol spray to disinfect these shelves before I start adding things on to them. This is bringing back some memories here because when I first started ever making videos way before YouTube, I didn't have a tripod. So right now I got you propped up on something. So I could still film a little bit before I finish my one hour of working on this project today, and I'm gonna have to go on Amazon and hopefully get a new dang tripod. So we moved into this house 10 years ago, and I am finding a lot of things that I'm finding in these cardboard boxes are from when we moved. Oh my gosh. We just took some boxes from moving and set them down here in the basement, and I have never touched them. How ridiculous. But I'm gonna get them all cleaned up. Well, not all in this project because this basement declutter is going to take a probably few weeks, at least two, maybe three, and I'm just talking for the unfinished part. We're not even touching the finished part today. So the guy from Goodwill that knows me and knows I usually bring in about three bags, he's probably gonna be surprised. My guess is I'm gonna be bringing in more than three bags from this project, we will see. So far, I've got one garbage bag almost full. I've got one donation bag almost full, and I have some dang clear shelves here. So that's making me feel pretty darn good. And my hour is up. So this is all I'm gonna be completing on this first day of this project, but I'll be back again. All right, we're on day two now. I cannot believe that my dang tripod broke yesterday. That was terrible. Thank goodness for Amazon. I already got a new one, so we should be good to film, and I got a new holder coming for my ring light. But I made some progress, not a ton. I kind of had a plan that I was gonna do like this half of the room, but that seems silly to me. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to clear all of this today. And like I told you, I haven't even showed you the whole basement. This is only the unfinished part of my basement that has a ton of storage room. If I can just get it organized, it will be so much better. But I got all, I still got all of this over here. I got some of my stockpile over here and more things. So anyways, I'm hoping for this video we can tackle all of this side. Maybe I'll even be able to get to some of this. I don't know, but we might have to save that for another video. I got 30 minutes right now before I have to go pick Viv up because she has a half day. So get what I can get done in 30 minutes and then I'll come back and work on it after I pick her up. Let's get to it. Okay, I do have some of the nice plastic storage containers and of course because they've been in here and all dusty and yucky, I'm gonna go ahead and wipe these all down, clean them, disinfect them and then of course go through them. And hopefully I will find some bins that I can use. And I've got some, oh my wedding book is in here. How fun is that? Well, I sure am glad that got put in a plastic bin so it didn't get ruined in a cardboard box and I found all kinds of painting supplies in here that I didn't even realize that I had. That's kind of helpful. And a paint stripper, but it's been in here for I don't even know how long so I don't even know if that's still good or not. I got the painter doing the basement upstairs right now. So I'll ask her how long that's good for. I'm gonna go ahead and use that bin for painting supplies. The bathroom upstairs, not the basement upstairs. Some of these Christmas decorations I haven't used in years. So I'm gonna dust these off and put these in my donation bag. And then I've got these super fancy curtain rods that came from my dining room when the painter painted and we ended up removing those curtains. So I got to figure out what I want to do with those. And then I've got those dang light bulbs. We just actually replaced the light in my laundry room. It took these type of light bulbs. So now I don't have anything in my house that takes these and I don't even know if some of those light bulbs are good or if they're bad. Oh geez. And an old dang computer tower. I'm gonna take this right to Staples and have them recycle it. I don't know why it's been sitting down here for years. And so I can get to these shelves. I'm gonna take care of some of this big stuff in front of them. These are gonna be donated because I haven't used these in years. All right, this makes my heart happy. Nothing fancy. I found some labels upstairs. I was actually just gonna use a piece of paper and write on it. I'm gonna label this so that I know what I have in here. I'm just gonna put it right over this. Doesn't have to be fancy. And that's it's crooked. Who cares? I know my paint supplies are in there. It's gonna make it so easy. All right, I ran and got Viv from school and since I was already going out, I stopped by Goodwill. I dropped off those Easter decorations, a bag full of donations, and then I ran to Staples and recycled the old computer tower. So I got that stuff out of my house and as I say, and I think every single video, there is no right or wrong way to declutter. If you want to wait till you have all the bags to take to the donation center or you want to wait until, because I'm gonna find more recycling I have to take to Staples. I already know that I am because I see a monitor that needs to go that's super old. For me, I was already going out anyways, and I would rather get it out of my house now. It doesn't matter to me if I make multiple trips. If I can get chunks out of my house to make it less overwhelming for me, that's what makes the most sense to me. And so I'm going to do it and I have to go pick up Donna in a few hours from school because she didn't have a half day today today today today today today. How many times did I just say today? Anyways, I might make another trip depending on how much I get done here. I truly truly dreaded trying to tackle this dang back room in my basement. But once I got going I could start to see little specks of progress happening and that just it just kept me motivated to keep going. And like I said, I I do this in chunks of time. I'm already on my second day. And I've taken breaks. I had to go get Viv from school and I just come back to it for a little bit. I usually like look at the clock and I'll say, OK, I have half an hour or I have an hour. It doesn't all have to be done at once. You do it in the chunks of time you have. And small little changes lead to big massive results in any goal that you're trying to achieve. And I just got to tell you I found a dang trash bag down here. They're a trash bin. My husband and I both like to play Texas Hold'em poker. And we used to actually I ran a poker league for a while. And so we had that I bought that trash can for down here. It's been in this back room for a while. So I just cleaned it all up. And now I'm going to have a trash bin for down in the basement, which will be super duper helpful. Geez, thinking about that poker league, boy, do I miss that? Things have sure changed with having big groups of people. We used to do it once a month. And I think we had about like 30 people that would come over. It was once a month on a Saturday. People would start showing up about 530. I'd get them all checked in. We'd run a tournament. It was so much fun. This basement is bringing back all kinds of memories. I think about maybe about eight years ago, I took a chalk painting class with a friend. A friend invited me to go. So I went and I thought it was super neat. And I bought this off a Facebook marketplace. It's like a jewelry holder. It's really pretty. And you can see I started to paint it. I painted the top and the back. And then I don't know what happened. My kids were super little then. I probably got busy. I don't know what I want to do with this. I might save it. Maybe I'll make something out of this. So guess what? Last week we hit 7,000 subscribers on the channel. Oh my gosh. I am so grateful for all of you. Thank you so much. That means a new giveaway. So I'm going to do another $25 Amazon gift card. I'll draw the winner next week when I post on Tuesday in my video, which will probably be another decluttering video. Maybe we'll do part two of the basement. So all you have to do to enter is you have to be a current subscriber. You have to give the video a thumbs up and leave me any comment down below. And that will enter you into the giveaway. All right, we've got another bin. I'm hoping to clear this one out so I can use it for other things. And oh my gosh, I found some great things for donation. But these super duper cute little... I bought these off Facebook Marketplace. They were like little dance costumes and I got them for my girls when they were little to play dress up. Aren't they so adorable? So yay, everything in here. These books haven't even been used. I'm going to donate all of this and I have a clear bin now. A couple more cardboard boxes that I need to go through down here. This one has, I don't know, just a bunch of like little random things that I'll either throw away or recycle if they can be recycled. I did find a couple of things in here that I can go ahead and put in my donation bag. The amount of recycling I'm going to be putting out this week is craziness. Oh my gosh. My husband pulls the trash to the curb on trash day and the recycling, which I'm so grateful for him that he does that. However, I will tell you, he's funny. He like gets worried that the trash collector or the recycling collectors are going to get upset if there's too much stuff. So as I have been doing this decluttering for months now, he will leave stuff in the garage because like he doesn't want to take it all out and save it for the next week. So when he leaves for work, I have to go behind him and take out the extra and put it by the curb. It's so funny how some people are so concerned over what other people think. And I'm just like, no, it's all going out today. We're not saving it for the next week. Otherwise, I'd never get this stuff out of my house. Oh my gosh. I found something super interesting in one of these boxes. I don't even know exactly what they are. I think they may have come from my great aunt when she passed away. I'm not entirely sure. I think these are like little old wine glasses. They're super duper cute. So I'm going to get these all washed up. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these yet. Okay, who went through the ding beanie baby craze? Because I sure did. I have gotten rid of a ton, but I still have that whole thing of beanie babies there. Oh my gosh, I can remember just going out hunting for them. I don't even think they're worth anything now. But of course, back then, you know, I thought they were going to pay for a brand new house for me or something. I don't know what I thought. And more recycling to take to Staples. I have another computer tower and this dang monitor. Remember how old these monitors were? That was a something word to get down. I won't say the word. Then it was a something word to get it out of my car and drag it into Staples. Oh my gosh, that dang thing was heavy, but I already took it to Staples and recycled it. Coming along empty shelves. I'm so excited and kind of empty shelves. I just kind of set things up there that I knew I'd be keeping. I've got two huge things of recycling here. Oh my goodness. Have another donation bag or bag going. I have another garbage bag going. All right, I'm going to start filling the shelves with the laundry that I wanted to fill it with to get some of it off the floor and get it out of my dining room. Get your hearts ready for this beautiful laundry stockpile that I have. Now, I know some people are going to be like, you have too much. You're a hoarder. Whatever they want to say. It doesn't matter to me. First of all, I love couponing. Second of all, prices have gone way up and I am so grateful that I know how to coupon to be able to get these household necessities. I haven't paid for laundry detergent and I don't know how long. I haven't paid for toilet paper. I haven't paid for paper towel. If you want to check out how to coupon, you should follow me over on my couponing channel. It is linked down in the description box. And I am so grateful that I know how to do this. And I love doing this. I supply my household with laundry. I supply my daughter hasn't bought laundry detergent. And I don't know how long my oldest daughter, Grayson. My mother doesn't buy laundry detergent. Now my father-in-law doesn't buy laundry detergent. It is such a blessing. And look at this beautiful wall of laundry. All right, one recycling bin, totally full. Dragging that out. I'm going to move my shop vac, which I need to buy a new filter for, in the corner. And I'm going to try to get some of this stuff out of the middle of the room. This dang bowling ball split right down the middle. I got to get rid of that. This is a broken fan that I'm going to take out. I don't know why it gets things like that just get put down here instead of just being taken out when they're broken and can't be used. And for now, I'm just going to go ahead and store these curtain rods down here to get them out of the way until I figure out if I want to use them again. Or if I'm going to buy new curtain rods for my dining room. And then I'm also going to store these light bulbs down here. I probably just need to find somebody that I know that maybe has a light like this. So I can give these to them because we're not going to use them now that we don't have a light that fits these light bulbs. Let me know if you get a real Christmas tree, if you celebrate Christmas, or if you use an artificial tree. We use an artificial tree. So I'm going to move this out of the middle of the room and just put that over there in the corner to get that out of the way. And then I remembered seeing this as I was decluttering this little bag here that I think is full of some painting supplies. So now that I have a bin for painting supplies, I'm just going to go ahead and move that in to the bin that it goes in. And although I have decluttered just a ton of stuff, taken stuff to the donation center, thrown stuff away, recycled stuff, sometimes organization or not organization, sometimes tidying up a room is really just about organizing. Like I had so much stuff just in the middle of the room, which made it look so cluttered. Things that I'm still keeping, like this is all the paint from, you know, when the painter has painted. And then I've got like all of these random tools that I found everywhere. My stepbrother is like the most handy person ever. Like he can do anything. And when we first moved into this house, there was a couple of things that needed fixing, like the water heater had broken. He did all that for us. He's since started his own business, so I can't get him to do anything because he's too busy now. OMG, I found a dang VCR. Are you even kidding me? I feel like I need to keep this. I still have some VHS tapes. So anyways, just finding things in the room and like actually making a bin for them and labeling them like all of those random tools that I have no idea what they do, but I don't know, maybe at some point we'll need them. And going through this box, I'm finding some dang Christmas lights. So I know I need to start a bin for my Christmas lights and get them out of this cardboard box. I am getting so close to finishing what I will be doing today. So I'm going to store these Christmas lights in here, but I want to take this opportunity to thank you so, so much for stopping by. I sure do appreciate you. I hope this video is giving you a little bit of motivation to tackle even just a small project in your home that you're wanting to tackle. Remember, I did this over multiple days and multiple chunks of time. I'm finding some old Halloween decor. I totally forgot I had that. My mom made me. She's so dang crafty. So I'm going to make a bin, this bin that I cleaned out and donated everything that was in, and this is going to store my Halloween decorations. And then when Halloween comes this year, I'll know exactly where they are and I can put them out. My girls are going to be so excited. And I'm going to try to tackle a little bit of this front area right when you walk in the door. I've got my box full of recycling things. So I noticed there was a bunch of just empty boxes from past Christmases or birthdays or things that just got shoved up here, probably because I thought I might save them in case I need them. And all they're doing is cluttering this space up. More Christmas lights. Look at that. So I'm going to try to fill up this box for donation before I put the donation, not donation, I'm going to try to fill up this box for recycling before I put the recycling out for the week. And so I can at least clear up this front space a little. And again, I had no expectations of being able to finish this entire basement all in one chunk. Sometimes we get stuck in that all or nothing mode. I used to totally get stuck in that mode. I do not do that anymore. I get what I can get done and then I can come back to it. And I found some more random tools. I don't know what this does, but it's a tool for something. And so I'm going to put it in the random tool bin that I made. And then I found a whole dang another bag full of paper. Oh my gosh. I hope this is the end of the paper that I find. But I just set it over there with the other box that I had found because I got to stay on track with getting the rest of this stuff decluttered. More recycling. Another dang empty box sitting here in this big green plastic tub. I'm going to go through this and see because this will be, oh, it's got a bunch of my girl's old book bags and toys and lunchboxes. So I can donate most of this stuff and clear out this. So I have this nice big plastic storage bin to use for other things that I may need. So now I've got a whole bunch of alcohol. You know, I coupon. I told you that. Who knew you could coupon for alcohol? I sure didn't. But let me tell you what. I made a whole bunch of money. Yes, a whole bunch of money. I don't know, probably $300 buying all this alcohol. I've given away so much because we just don't drink that often. But I still have a ton. And it's funny because my daughter, my oldest daughter, Grayson, she'll be like, hey, I need to come over and go shopping in your store. She calls my base at my store. And one day she comes over and she goes, oh, my gosh, the store has alcohol now. I'm like, yes, the store has alcohol now. All right. I grabbed some labels from upstairs. I'm going to go ahead and write on these so that all of the bins that I'm keeping, I can label and I'll remember and know exactly what is in each one of them. And I had to keep on looking to remember which bins I had over there so I could make the labels for them. And maybe someday I'll get a fancy label maker. But right now, I don't have one and I don't need one. I can just hand write these labels. And that's going to make everything super functional and super organized. So don't let getting fancy gadgets stop you from doing things. If I couldn't have even found these labels in my house, I literally would have just taken a piece of paper and taped it on there. All right. I'm going to move some of these things from the middle of the room so that I can do a little bit of sweeping because it is so, so dusty down here from the furnace and the water softener being down here. But I'm just going to clean up the floor as best as I can. Oh, my gosh. I'm almost finished. Can you see how dusty that is? Can you see the dust flying up? It is so bad down here. We recently had all of our, like, air ducts cleaned out, which, I mean, you should just do that anyways. Probably on a regular basis. I don't know. At least every couple of years, maybe. But it's still, even with doing that, it's still super duper dusty down here. It just is what it is. This is the back room, unfinished part of the basement. The furnace is running all the time in Michigan. The water softener is running all the time. That's why I really want to get rid of all of the cardboard boxes that I have anything stored in and put them in plastic bins so they're not getting ruined. So I'm just putting the finishing touches on trying to get this floor as clean as I can get it or as, you know, sweep up all the dust that I can. And I think I just have one more garbage bag that I have to take out. To put towards the garbage. And then we're going to take a look at the before and the after. Here we go with the before. Oh my gosh. This room was a complete disaster. It was a cluttered mess. We didn't even have a clear space to walk through here. Just non-functional, non-organized, and just had so much junk down here. So this is what it looks like. And I'm so excited to show you the after. Are you ready? Oh my gosh, I'm ready. Remember when we walked in this room before? Don't pay attention to that side. We didn't touch that side today. You couldn't even see the dang floor when we walked in. Let me turn the lights on. And of course, I got to shut the door because Tom will try to get in here. I know it's basement lighting, so it's terrible. I'm going to go over here real quick. And turn on this light so we can see a little bit more. And I'll show you what I did. So we had an absolute disaster. And now we have a somewhat organized basement. I am so excited that we have a clear path that we can actually walk in here. All right, so I've got my wall of laundry. Half a wall of laundry. It only took up half of that wall. And I've got all that alcohol I told you about down there. So that is that. Now my plan for this was to store. I'm going to be making some like memory boxes for my girls. And I was going to store them up here. I bought these super duper cute ones from Target. They don't fit. They don't fit on these shelves. So this is like the biggest size that will fit, which is fine because I have more of these. And then this shelf is like super short, so it can only fit the little bins. But anyways, my plan is. All right, so we're going to do part two, I think, next week. And we're going to tackle this side of the room. So a lot of that's going to be Christmas decorations over there. So I'll move the Christmas decorations to this side. And I will put my girls memory boxes over there because those don't have. I can stack the boxes or the plastic bins on top of each other. Those are a lot bigger. So anyways, we now have a clear space to walk into. I am so, so happy. I ended up taking, I think, four bags to the Goodwill. Plus, I had, I think, two or three trips to the Goodwill. Plus, I took like, I had a princess vanity from when my girls were little. I had some other bigger like plastic toys, like a baby doll crib. I took all of that to Goodwill. I have made two trips to Staples to recycle the old computer towers. And that dang heavy monitor right over here. I already showed you in the beginning of the video. This was a box full of paper that I have not gone through. And then I found another dang bag full of paper that was not in my time slot today. So I left it right in the middle of the room. So I know I got to take care of that. And I will. It just wasn't done in this video. I just have to shred things and go through and make sure there's no important papers in there. But I got all of my things labeled. So I know what's in there. I've got my paint supplies, some Christmas decor, some Christmas lights. If you hear a beeping noise, sorry, like I don't even hear it anymore. It's a battery backup. So sorry, I know it's annoying, but I don't even hear it anymore. I've got those random tools and parts in there. I've got some like Halloween decor down there. So we'll just fill this up with like the rest of my Christmas stuff on these empty shelves. But can you believe how much empty space I have? All of these these shelves right here were like halfway cluttered. These were completely filled with clutter. And I was able to put all of my laundry here. And then I've got another bin up there full of stuff. And I want to keep that monitor in case I think it still works. And in case we get another computer versus just the laptop, then I kept it. And you know what? I kept the dang VCR because I didn't want to get rid of it yet. So there you go. It is what it is. I feel so much better about this space and about being able to walk through here. So again, the plan is next week we'll tackle this side of the room. What do I do with these dang TVs? Goodwill won't take them. You can't even give these away for free. Do I got to call like a garbage haul service and have them haul it away? Like give me your suggestions. What do I do with these dang TVs? They're taking up so much space. I want to get rid of them. Nobody wants these big old TVs. I can't even lift this TV. It's freaking huge and heavy. So anyways. All right. That's what I got for you today. This was a huge project. I only finished half of half of the basement because I finished that half of the room. Not this half of the room. I haven't even touched that half of the room over there. OMG. This side of the room is much bigger than the other side where the furnace is. And the furnace takes up a lot of room. But anyways, that's what I got for you today. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. I appreciate you so much for stopping by. Hopefully you were able to declutter with me or get some motivation. I appreciate you so much. I'm going to see you next week. I'm thinking for part two of the basement. So stay tuned. I hope you have a great day. Bye.